Читать книгу Temporariness - John Kinsella - Страница 10

Promptly on the very last day of August, the weather tips. After days of uninterrupted sun and heat, a late-evening thunderstorm announces the onset of rain. The next morning, drizzle, punctuated by stronger showers, sets in. Mist nestles in the valleys, and the tip of the Kandel is shrouded in cloud. Sheets of persistent rain, not heavy but opaque nonetheless, blur the steep outlines of the ridges. This is the seasonal shift towards autumn, we say to ourselves—forgetting how utterly changeable and erratic the weather has become: the ‘temps’, ‘tiempo’ is nothing less than temporary in its abrupt shifts from one day to the next (the ten days of sun that preceded this change has been a welcome exception to the months of moodiness before). Now, forgetting all that, we slip back into the age-old habit of reading off the seasons like a chain of rosary beads. The shift has been announced for weeks, we intone, by the first splashes of gold and russet on isolated trees in the forest. Indeed, the oak that guards the turn in the road at the bottom end of our little valley, just opposite the tavern ‘Zum Grünen Baum’ where the Griesbach flows into the Wilde Gutach, has in fact increasingly stridently played the variations on a full range of autumn colours since we arrived ten days ago.

This version of the temporality of the seasons—temporary in a sense that is anything but temporary, viewed within the large scheme of things—is itself an avatar of the timelessness of the mountain now hidden by low cloud and the grey panes of rain, now revealed through a gap in the drifting mists. At the beginning of his magisterial Stone, Cohen (2005: 3) suggests that the sheer timelessness of the mountain ‘is something more than an allegory for Edenic nature, a figure in a human story of balanced inhabitance and expansive earthly interconnections. ... Climb a mountain to seek a vista and its native prospect will give you ontological vertigo. To think like a mountain requires a leap from ephemeral stabilities, from the diminutive boundedness of merely human tales.’

Yet we are slowly beginning to appreciate the temporalities of such entities as mountains, from the wrong end, as it were, as we see the glaciers melt. A narrative of the nefarious effects of human activity upon the global environment now includes the thawing of these immense ice reservoirs as global warming proceeds apace. For millions of rural inhabitants in India, for instance, the thawing of the Himalayan glaciers, which function as immense water-storage receptacles and water-supply regulators, means more erratic patterns of water availability, with catastrophic consequences as droughts alternate with floods (Ghosh 2016: 89-90). (And those issues do not even approach the threat emanating from the Artic ice cap as it melts in ever accelerating cycles of feedback that see the thaw reaching into the coastal shelf seabed, realeasing methane plumes into the atmosphere—or even methane flares that signal the onset of an even more aggressive rise in global warming rates [Wadhams 2017]).

But as we come at this problem of cosmic proportions from another angle, we may discover an ongoing mode of natural agency that continues unabated. For the native Americans of the Alaskan and Canadian circumpolar North, ‘glaciers take action and respond to their surroundings. They are sensitive to smells and they listen. They make moral judgements and they punish infractions. ... Glaciers also enter accounts left by early North Atlantic visitors who wrote with a different idiom and brought distinctive environmental visions to their interpretations’ (Cruikshank 2005: 3). What happens when we shift from the environmentally aware but still precariously anthropocentric North Atlantic frame of reference to the posthuman frame of reference that envisages glaciers as actors, almost as slow as mountains but not quite, and today gradually limbering up for an accelerated and bad-tempered mode of actantial intervention in the globally warming world? The seasons change according to their customary, age-old rhythm, do they not? And the Kandel stands, sometimes visible, sometimes shrouded in cloud—but what if the Kandel were burning, and slowly melting away in a wilful exercise of its own hitherto dormant agency?

At this point we might have to reassess our entire framing of our own agency in the fraught political area of global environmental politics—and of global politics tout court, because there is nothing, in fact, that escapes the gambit of the politics of global warming. Perhaps, in rethinking the time of ‘temps’ and ‘tiempo’, we might also rethink the relationships between temporality, temporariness and our own actantial contributions to a threatened world. For, if we are to rethink politics in a world where glaciers are ‘both animate (endowed with life) and animating (giving life to) landscapes they inhabit’ (Cruikshank 2005: 3) we need to rethink our notions of agency. This ‘animated’ and ‘animist’ approach to the world does not merely attribute agency to entities habitually thought of an inert or passive (the agency of the glacier as merely an immensely slow manifestation of the downward pull of gravity), but rather, sees all entities in the world as co-actants: endowed with devolved agency by their neighbouring actants with whom they exist in an ineluctable meshwork of interaction. Life, or ‘the living’, Simondon (1964: 260) claims, ‘lives at the limit of itself, on its limit’ (qtd in Deleuze 1990: 103). It does so in a constant encounter, at the edge, with Others who thereby endow it with their life. Animist agency in this reading is not ‘internal’ to the hitherto inert or lifeless object, but, true to the etymology, like a wind, blows through each entity, transversally, animating them from outside (Ingold 2011: 29). Animist agency is not a stable attribute of an entity, but rather, a temporary, tempestuously ‘windy’, fluctuating derivative. Agency can never exist without a hyphen, and it can never exist except in a provisional and contingent temporal mode. Agency is never a given, but must be constantly renegotiated with the co-agents that co-determine what agency might be, and where it might lead.

Agency, then, by definition, is related to the new. It does not imply the reproduction of self by the imposition of will in an intentional vector beyond and in front of oneself, as Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) phenomelogical spatiality implies. This merely translates into the colonial vector of conquest celebrated by Carter’s Road to Botany Bay (1987) in the colonial act of travelling-as-naming. Rather, this mode of agency implies the production of the new at every turn, because every instance of agency involves an engagement with an other. Such engagements cannot be predicted in advance. Their temporal mode is that of the contingent, the exploratory, the tentative—even if they are an engagement with the actantial temporality of a mountain.

Thinking agency anew, as the new, in the light of animist interactions, may be a surprising and unexpected key to political renewal. Slavoj Žižek (2016: 108) laments the utter untimeliness of democratic politics today, citing the hopeless fate of democratic governments from Greece to Venezuela as examples of a politics that is completely against the flow of history. Such opposition to history, he suggests, is in fact a freedom from the shackles of history, a freedom to act, and to produce the new out of the sheer dynamics of desperation. Mark Terkessidis (2017) similarly demands a complete renewal of the politics of migration, given the utter lack of future perspectives or vision displayed by the political class as they react to the ineluctable refugee crises that characterize our times. Only the work of imagination, he suggests, will produce new options under these circumstances.

For such a ‘new’ to emerge, we must embrace a version of co-agency that welcomes all actants into the coalition of the democratic, nonhuman as well as human. The times of shared democratic agency may sometimes be tempestive, seasonal, but we must not mistake them for some putatively true temporality of the agency of mountains. Stolid and unmoving as they may seem, the agency of mountains may also be tempestuous and unpredictable—within a time- and speed-frame to which we are only just beginning to accustom ourselves.

RWP